But You Did Not Come Back by Marceline Loridan-Ivens

9780571328024 Faber and Faber

A runaway best-seller in France, But You Did Not Come Back is the deeply moving memoir of a survivor of the Holocaust. 'I was quite a cheerful person, you know, in spite of what happened to us.' In 1944, at the age of fifteen, Marceline Loridan-Ivens was arrested in occupied France, along with her father. They were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland.

When they arrived, they were forcibly separated. Though he managed to smuggle a last note to her via an electrician, she never spoke to him again. But You Did Not Come Back is Marceline's letter to the father she would never know as an adult, to the man whose death has enveloped her life.

With poignant honesty, she tells him of the events that have continued to haunt her, of the collapse of their family, and of her efforts to find a place in a changing world. This is a breathtaking memoir by an extraordinary woman, and an intimate and deeply moving message from a daughter to her father.